The Sessions Hearing’s Inconclusive First Day

“There are areas that are rightly clear and right, there are areas that may be gray, and there are areas that are unacceptable,” Senator Jeff Sessions, of Alabama, said on Tuesday, at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “And a good Attorney General needs to know where those lines are, to help the President where possible and to resist improper, unacceptable actions.” But what, exactly, is unacceptable to Sessions, when it comes to Donald Trump? The hearing did not quite manage to wrest an answer from Sessions on that point, despite some disturbing glimpses. Nor did the Democrats manage, at least on the first day, to present a clear narrative of why Sessions is unacceptable—something that, given the material they had, one might have imagined they could do. Sessions was denied confirmation as a federal judge, in 1986, with, as I’ve written before, good reason. Then, the hearing uncovered comments he had made about race and a troubling record when it came to civil-rights enforcement; more recently, Sessions served as an unabashed cheerleader for Donald Trump at his ugliest, most jingoistic moments. But what Democrats mostly sought to do was to offer ways for Sessions to distinguish himself from Trump—to drag him into the gray, perhaps with hopes that he would, in turn, do his part to keep Trump out of the worst of the murk.

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